The gaunt figure said, “Starving yourself? You think that’s an acceptable way for a Guile to go? Grow a spine.”
“I control what I can,” Gavin said.
“I didn’t peg you for a coward.”
“What do you mean?” Gavin challenged his reflection. I’m unhinged, he thought.
“Make up your mind. You still have teeth, don’t you? You want to live, bite the bread. You want to die, bite your wrist. Bleed out.”
Maybe it wasn’t his imagination.
Gavin could imagine taunting himself, but this wasn’t how he would have done it.
With his hands in front of his face, Gavin couldn’t see if the reflection’s mouth moved in time with his own or not. Was his sanity so tenuous?
“What am I doing?” Gavin asked aloud. Talking to oneself was one thing, talking as if one were really two different people was something else.
Then he felt a chill down his spine. He could have sworn this time the reflection didn’t move quite correctly.
He tilted his head. Squinted. Sniffed. The reflection wasn’t quite moving in time with him.
“You don’t remember?” the reflection asked. This time, Gavin was sure its mouth moved, whereas his hadn’t. But the voice was all in his head. “Where’s your perfect memory, Gavin Guile?” it asked.
“Dazen.”
“Doesn’t matter now, does it? After what you did. Filicide.”
No. It didn’t matter. “What are you?” Gavin asked. “I don’t feel mad. Nor fevered. I’ve not been fasting so long that I should see apparitions.”
“You really don’t remember. I’m appalled. Gavin Guile, the man so near to being a god, has forgotten his own creation? But some part of you does remember, doesn’t it? Else why are you talking in your sleep?”
“What are you talking about? What are you?” And then it hit him. “Orholam have mercy, you’re the dead man.” The name itself was a distant echo. Something his brother had ranted about once, years before, perhaps?
“You still don’t understand how cruel you really are, do you?”
“I wasn’t cruel,” Gavin said. “I did what I had to. I couldn’t kill him, and I couldn’t let him go. This was the only way. It was only supposed to be until I established my rule. Things escaped me. There was never a time I could release him safely. I thought there would be, someday. I never did anything to be cruel, though. It was never that.”
The apparition grinned, unconvinced. Like Gavin was pathetic.
“The black didn’t take that much from you,” the dead man said. “I know you wanted it to. You fed the black every obscenity you’d committed, every crime and horror. Black luxin is forgetting and madness and oblivion so it mostly worked. But one thing it is not. It isn’t clean. It never works exactly as you hope, does it? You forget the wrong things, and it sticks like tar on the fingers of your mind.”
For years, Gavin hadn’t even remembered that drafting black was possible. He must have fed even his knowledge of how to draft black into the black. For years, he hadn’t been able to remember what he’d done. Certainly not how. Hellishly, now—too late—it was coming back to him in bits and pieces, black stones turned over in the light, cutting memories best left on the banks of the river Regret. “What are you?” he asked.
“You created these prisons, the first one in a single month, the rest over the course of the first year. It was a mammoth undertaking. A brilliant demonstration of your gifts, and of your monomania and your fear. But you knew. You knew he’d be down here for a long time, and you knew he would have nothing to do but figure out how to undo what you had done. And destruction is ever so much easier than creation, isn’t it?
“But then you realized that wasn’t true only of things, but also of men. Destruction is easier than creation. So you made me. A reflection of yourself. A distraction. A dissuasion. You knew that eventually Gavin would figure out an escape, unless you could keep him from turning his mind to the puzzle fully. So you made me, to destroy him first, so he could never destroy your prison.”
“No,” Gavin said. It was too plausible, too smart.
“You had been exploring the forbidden arts of will-casting, and so you will-cast a portion of yourself into this prison. I am indeed a reflection of you, Dazen. I am all the hatred you had for your older, stronger, more assured big brother, with his natural air of superiority, with his total ownership of father’s affection and father’s pride, with his easy mastery of all that came to hand. With his casual contempt for you. You only needed me to be a distraction, but you decided to go far beyond that. You made me to be an instrument of torture. Your brother lived alone, with only your hatred to keep him company for sixteen years.”
“I would never…”
“You are a crueler man than you know. Of course, then you used the black to obliterate the memory of what you had done, even from yourself. As if sin forgotten is sin forgiven.”
Gavin swallowed.
“But all magic fades, scoured slowly by the sands of passing years, and you’re starting to remember, aren’t you?”
It couldn’t be true. But it fit. He had recently dreamed about his first Freeing as the Prism, and that dream had ended with his using black luxin. On purpose, to blot out memory.
It had worked. He had lost his memory of that night—and how many others?—for more than seventeen years.
With how much evil he could remember that he’d done, how much worse must the memories be that the old him had decided needed to be fed to the black?
“You can get out of here, you know,” the dead man said through heavy-lidded eyes.
“How?” Gavin asked.
“You know how.”
Draft black. One last time.
“Any idea that starts with the words ‘one last time’ is a bad idea,” Gavin muttered.
“What?” the dead man asked.
“Something father used to say.”
“You’re older now. More in control of yourself and your magic. You could do it safely.”
“I have no magic.”
“You can have the black again.”
“No. It is madness and poison and murder and death. It’s what got me here.”
“Yes, here, alive,” the dead man said. “How much do you remember about Sundered Rock?”